Musician in the Museum: Display and Power in Neoliberal Popular Culture

Description

In recent years, popular music museums have been established in high profile locations in many of the presumed "musical capitals" of the world, such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, Seattle, Memphis, and Nashville. Most of these are defined by expansive experiential infrastructures centered around spectacular, high-tech displays of varying sizes and types. Through over-the-top acts of display, these museums influence and reflect the values and priorities in the public life of popular music. This book examines the phenomenon of the popular music museum outside the typical and familiar frames of heritage and tourism. Instead, it looks at these institutions as markers of the broader entertainment industry in the era of its rise to global dominance. It highlights the multiple manifestations of power as read across a range of institutions and material forms and discusses how this contributes to shaping the experience of popular culture.

Charles Fairchild is Associate Professor of Popular Music at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Sound, Screens, Speakers (Bloomsbury, 2019), Danger Mouse's The Grey Album (Bloomsbury, 2014), Music, Radio and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2012) and Pop Idols and Pirates (Ashgate, 2008).

Charles Fairchild's comprehensive and thought-provoking Musician in the Museum inscribes popular music back into the realm of neo-liberal politics. The book offers a welcome critical intervention on how we think about the contemporary value of popular music and will certainly have considerable effects on academic, journalistic, and vernacular discourses on the heritagization of popular music. * Raphael Nowak, Cultural Sociologist, Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France * Musician in the Museum shows how proliferating music museums function to reinforce neoliberal ideologies. Charles Fairchild's book usefully adds to the growing literature on music in today's capitalism. * Timothy D. Taylor, Professor, Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA, USA * This book contributes to the scarce literature on music and neoliberalism and the criticism of the production and reproduction of social inequalities by exploring popular music museums in cities such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, Seattle and Nashville that have become a crucial part of the Western entertainment industry. In a stimulating way, the book provides important insights into the broader neoliberal restructuring on the social, cultural and economic contexts in which popular culture is situated and shows how popular music museums contribute to the acceleration of these restructuring processes. Thus, the book challenges not only certain established theories for analyzing popular culture but also draws our attention to the well-trodden paths employed by popular music museums to construct white male musicians as "great artists" and audiences as ideal neoliberal subjects. In short, the book guides its readers through a challenging analysis of neoliberalism that goes far beyond popular music museums. * Rosa Reitsamer, Professor of Music Sociology, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria *